School Lunch = Meow Meow Meow Meow
 

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/1...school_lunches

Why Is Crappy Fast Food Safer Than School Lunches?
Posted by Tara Lohan at 7:20 AM on December 28, 2009.

Thanks to the USDA, at school our kids are eating the equivalent of pet food.

A study by USA Today found that the U.S. government's school lunch program, via the USDA, handed schools millions of pounds of beef and chicken that wouldn't even clear the standards of of fast food restaurants like Jack in the Box and KFC.

The quality of meat in fast food restaurants has always frightened me, but not as much as reading this:

McDonald's, Burger King and Costco, for instance, are far more rigorous in checking for bacteria and dangerous pathogens. They test the ground beef they buy five to 10 times more often than the USDA tests beef made for schools during a typical production day.

And the limits Jack in the Box and other big retailers set for certain bacteria in their burgers are up to 10 times more stringent than what the USDA sets for school beef.

For chicken, the USDA has supplied schools with thousands of tons of meat from old birds that might otherwise go to compost or pet food. Called "spent hens" because they're past their egg-laying prime, the chickens don't pass muster with Colonel Sanders-- KFC won't buy them -- and they don't pass the soup test, either. The Campbell Soup Company says it stopped using them a decade ago based on "quality considerations."

So, our kids are eating food that's about the equivalent of pet food. And a whole lot of kids. The article notes that 31 million students a day eat this meat and "President Obama noted earlier this year that, for many children, school lunches are 'their most nutritious meal -- sometimes their only meal -- of the day,'" which is also frightening.

And it gets worse.

"Each year the USDA purchases more than $1 billion in cheap commodities as part of the federal contribution to the school lunch program," wrote David Murphy for Civil Eats. "Regretfully, the USDA is driven by two factors: get the food for the lowest price and prop up prices for commodities that are in oversupply or are unattractive to business purchases. Not quality. In 2009 alone, the USDA purchased more than $151 million of commodity pork to prop up failing industrial pork producers."

Our children shouldn't be a dumping bin for food waste and a prop for failing agribusiness.

It's still better than the dirt sandwiches the neighborhood bully forced me to eat as a kid...and the knuckle sandwich I forced him to eat after I out grew him.

Disturbing, yes. But when 70% of KC students are on free and reduced lunch, and the district is laying off personnel and shutting schools, who is going to pay for higher quality meat?

More attempted paranoia.

How did billions of kids ever make it through the public education system alive and healthy??

Reason 892649866 my boys go to private school. Although I will say that where I grew up (Iowa) the public schools were damn good schools.

Eh, what doesn't kill you just makes you stronger.

sh*t...I had know idea what I was eating in school lunches; didn't care. they didn't taste too bad, and I was usually starving by lunch time.
I turned out fine.

used to drink water from a pump well thingy at a local park when I was thirsty from running aroud the playground. Had to crawl into a big bush to get to it. I turned out fine. My wife is shocked when I drink a glass of water that came from the faucet.

Our whole food system is ****ed from the ground up and is killing us all.

Awesome Kong FTW

Ehhhh when IIIIIIIIIIII went to school we had tapeworm larvae stew with cigarette butts in gallstone sauce every day and nobody ever complained. Because it was a FREE LUNCH and you knew that was a deal that couldn't be beat! You ate your damn lunch with PRIDE! And just look how I turned out!

When I went to school I saved my lunch money for the arcade. Better to get four games of Tron than eat that shit.

That's what's wrong with you kids today. When I was a boy we didn't get any damned free gallbladder sauce. We paid for our gallbladder sauce! With our own money, that we earned working nights in the coal mines!

No wonder you young people have become so soft.

Lunch? You got lunch? When I was a boy we didn't get lunch we WERE lunch. Every day at noon we had to take off our laces (we didn't have shoes like you spoiled brats we just braided our own hair and tied it around our toes) and offer up our feet to the teachers for their sustenance. And God help us if we didn't re-grow whatever flesh they ate off of us by the next day.
Lunch my ass. That's why kids are so damn helpless today.